How Does the Wild Diet Differ to Paleo and LCHF diets?

The Wild Diet is probably most similar to a paleo diet, sans the cheat day thing.

It’s quite a lot different to an LCHF diet in that it allows beer, sourdough bread, non-gluten grains and natural sugars (maple syrup/coconut sugar, etc.occasional)

In addition to this, there are occasional days where you can eat anything. Some may argue that these casual days help make the diet less restrictive and increase the success rate of sticking to it (1).

On the other hand, cheat days can cause problems for people with an unhealthy relationship with food, or a food addiction.

For instance, so many people have difficulty controlling sugar and wheat consumption. As a result, eating them for one-day only can be extremely difficult (2, 3, 4, 5).

People the Wild Diet is Unsuitable For

While the Wild Diet is most likely healthy for the majority of people, there are some groups better suited to an LCHF diet:

Diabetics: people with diabetes often do better on low-carb diets, and LCHF diets have proven benefits in controlling blood sugar levels. We can say the same for those with a high degree of insulin resistance.

Food addicts: people who find it difficult to give up certain foods probably shouldn’t eat them at all. After all, you wouldn’t give an alcoholic a pint of beer, would you? Despite being somewhat controversial and not being fully recognized as a medical problem, research on the issue of “food addiction” is constantly growing (6, 7, 8).

Key Point: The Wild Diet shares a lot of similarities with a Paleo Diet. It’s also not as strict as the LCHF diet in terms of adherence.

Does the Wild Diet Work?

Undoubtedly, if you are coming off the standard diet most Western nations eat, you’ll see great improvements with the Wild Diet.

Industrial vegetable oils, refined grains, and sugar are the very worst ingredients in our food chain.

In view of this, any diet that cuts them out will certainly improve weight loss and overall health. When we restrict all these refined carbohydrates, we stabilize blood sugar and insulin levels (9, 10).

This is important because insulin plays a role in storing fat in the body, and excessive insulin levels naturally lead to weight gain (11, 12, 13).

Additionally, the Wild Diet doesn’t discourage fats like many of the other diets do. Saying that fat makes you fat — or that it clogs arteries — is outdated poor science that belongs nowhere near dietary advice.

In fact, in many randomized controlled trials (RCTs), those eating the most fat actually lose the most weight. Further, they have less negative health markers associated with cardiovascular risk (14, 15, 16).

Despite these benefits, the wild diet does also advocate cheat days and non-gluten grains. For metabolically healthy people, these occasional foods are unlikely to cause problems.

However, there should be a definite limit to poorer dietary choices.

Key Point: For the most part, the Wild Diet restricts sugar, grains and vegetable oils and emphasizes healthy real foods. As a result, many people achieve success with the diet.

My Diet Is Better Than Yours

Interestingly, the Wild Diet was one of the diets involved in the ‘My Diet Is Better Than Yours’ TV program.

This particular program pit five different diets against each other in order to see which one results in the biggest weight loss.

The person behind each diet worked with a contestant, guiding them in how to correctly utilize their eating plan.

Here are the different diets and how they fared:

The Wellness Smackdown (5th position / 16 lbs gain / +7.51%)

An “anti-inflammatory vegan diet” that “uses herbs to detoxify the body”.

Not surprisingly, this diet came last and it was the only contestant who actually gained weight.

Note: Be wary of any magical detoxifying potions you come across. We already have a perfectly good detoxifying system; it’s called the liver.

The No Diet Plan (4th position / -64 lbs loss / -17.83%)

A non-restrictive plan that focuses on behavioral modification and portion control.

The Clean Momma Plan (3rd position / -45 lbs loss / -18.52%)

A diet that is based on whole foods and cuts out processed food products.

The Wild Diet (2nd position / -87 lbs loss / -24.72%)

The Wild Diet came in 2nd place and also had the single biggest weight loss in pounds.

The Superfood Swap Diet (1st position / -53 lbs loss / -26.5%)

A diet plan that focuses on replacing favorite foods with a healthier version.

As we can see from the results, the Wild Diet definitely held its own. It’s also interesting to note that Abel James is described as simply a “blogger” on the diet bios.

However, in terms of weight loss, the advice of this “blogger” outperformed a nutrition consultant, a “detox expert”, “celebrity personal trainer” and an “experienced master trainer”.

Key Point: The Wild Diet wasn’t the ‘My Diet Is Better Than Yours’ winner, but in terms of absolute weight loss, it beat all the other diets.

Diets Similar to the Wild Diet

As mentioned earlier, the obvious comparison is with the Paleo Diet.

Both of these ways of eating have very similar traits and the only difference is the addition of dairy and the slightly less restrictive nature of the Wild Diet.

Another very similar diet is Mark Sisson’s Primal Blueprint Diet.

The Primal Blueprint is also pretty much a cross between LCHF (it encourages consumption of healthy dairy and higher intakes of fat) and Paleo.

Overall, there are many different diets which share similar principles:

LCHF

The Atkins Diet

The Bulletproof Diet

The Ketogenic Diet

The Paleo Diet

The Primal Blueprint

The Whole 30

Generally speaking, if implemented correctly, these diets all work due to their restriction of carbohydrate to reasonable levels and their shunning of refined food.

No one diet (or more specifically: macronutrient ratio) is right for everyone, and this largely depends on individual biology. So, while some may function best on extremely low carb ketogenic diets, others might thrive on the slightly higher carb Wild Diet (17).

Key Point: There are many slightly different but similar diets. The right one for someone else might not be the right one for you. Do your research, see how you feel, and listen to your body.

Wild Diet Recipes

Official Wild Diet recipes are behind a paywall, but to get a general idea, you can see recipes that followers have made on Pinterest.

Should I Use the Wild Diet?

Whether or not you should use the Wild Diet is a personal choice.

Compared to many other diet plans out there, it’s definitely one of the better ones. It also has a supportive community behind it, which can be an important motivational factor.

At the end of the day, the most important thing is to base your diet around fresh, nutrient-dense, whole foods.

If you do that, you’ll be healthier no matter what diet plan you prefer.

Hi Michael Joseph, Thank you very much for your rich answer. But I am still have question about some healthy type of rice like “ black rice, wehani rice, sprouted rice, wild rice and brown rice” Which one? Do you recommend if I can eat a little bit of some these types of rice occasionally. Especially if I lost my energy. And what do you recommend for alternatives for lose energy if these healthy type of rice not good? Your opinion please. Thanks

If you just want to have a little bit occasionally, then I’d go for whichever you enjoy the most.

As for energy, well we can get that from both carbs or fat (if on a low carb diet). So, there are many different foods you can eat! Carb wise – sweet potatoes and fruit are very energy-dense. Then there are nuts, fatty meat, and so on.

In other words – refined flour, sugar, and (possibly?) veg oil/margarine are still not ideal even if the product IS organic and gluten-free.

Of course, it depends on the exact ingredients… there are probably a few healthier recipes around.

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1 year ago

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BW

A ‘Cheat Day’ can be ASTOUNDINGLY effective, both from a motivation/compliance point of view and a continued weight loss angle. A planned cheat day can be (for many) the only thing that stops one’s metabolism from downshifting. A great excerpt about cheat days from: https://www.t-nation.com/diet-fat-loss/in-defense-of-cheat-days The theoretical benefits of cheat days are: Increased thyroid hormone output. When in a caloric deficit, underfed individuals produce less T3 and T4–both important thyroid hormones that play roles in the regulation of metabolic rate. A cheat day or strategic overfeed is used in part to increase these hormones. Increased 24-hour energy expenditure. A caloric… Read more »

Those things are related to being in a calorie deficit, though – but what about for those who are not in a calorie deficit?

It also depends on each individual’s relationship with food too. For those who have some kind of food addiction, cheating is probably the worst thing they can do.

From a bodybuilding/elite athlete’s perspective, then to cheat occasionally is not so much a problem. Having said that, stuff like industrial vegetable oils and HFCS are always best avoided in my opinion.